Samely Situation
by KrysSaiyan
Summary: It felt good, seeing the proof that he wasn't the only one held against his will, he wasn't the only one unhappy with their imprisonment, not the only one bitter and angry about it. Snape and a faerie a Deatheater spy and his potion ingredients.


Samely Situation

Tiny delicate limbs batted against the glass. The room outside of her self-contained world was dark- and gigantic. No windows, torches on brackets attached to the stone walls... other things stared at her from their own glass enclosures, but they were dead and she wasn't.

Severus Snape sat in his chair, looking at the little faerie in a jar resting on top of the table. The creature's tiny hands battered themselves against the glass furiously, and he leaned in closer to see the furious look on her miniscule face as she squirmed and fought for a way out. She wasn't getting out. He didn't pretend she was going to be used for anything but his potions, but he allowed himself to lean closer still, and allowed himself to feel- just a bit- for the tiny thing. Trapped. He knew that feeling.

She bared her teeth at him and snapped them, and he indulged in a small smile. It felt good, he mused. It felt good, seeing the proof that he wasn't the only one held against his will, he wasn't the only one unhappy with their imprisonment, not the only one bitter and angry about it.

He took in the shimmer of her wings, the litheness of her body, even as he counted to himself the number of ways her various organs could be useful. It was something he found himself doing more often, analyzing anyone and everyone for their usefulness, in potions or not. It went with being Slytherin, he supposed.

Her wings fluttered briefly and glittered, and he couldn't help but admire them. He was not a man who indulged in fine art like Lucius, or pursued any number of pleasures otherwise available to him. He did not actively seek out beauty, and often when it did bump into him, he would find some flaw, something that tainted it. It was a hobby.

But for now he let himself admire the beauty of this little creature. He supposed if he were younger he would have wished to protect it. He wouldn't have released it, because even then beautiful things were few and far between, and he clung to them ravenously whenever they presented themselves. She was _his_, whether she wished to be or not. Being in control of something felt good.

She _was_ beautiful, he admitted in his own mind. Tiny and fragile and beautiful. At some point in his life, he would have certainly felt a sort of protective feeling towards her, though she wasn't human and obviously hated him. It would have been simply because he knew that she was small and delicate and beautiful, and because he felt those things needed to be protected.

He was none of those things.

He leaned back with a soft exhale, and rested for a minute before standing and picking up the glass bottle, pushing it onto a shelf.

He was careful not to jostle it too much, but his tiny prisoner did not notice.

* * *

The next time he peered into the jar, he felt a tiny, much protected part of him cry out in sorrow. He didn't indulge in emotions, but there was no way to kill that part. It just kept hurting anyway.

She was pathetic.

When he lifted the jar to his face, the faerie was slumped at the bottom, limbs limp with exhaustion, and she looked up blearily at him. Her wings no longer shimmered, and he felt a kind of aversion and repulsion rear up in him.

Broken. She was broken. And so quickly, so easily! He hadn't even shaken her prison, and she had already given up! Weak. Why did beautiful things have to break so easily? Why were they so frail and finite? He sneered at her, but she did not react. She merely stared at him with dull eyes, though he wished she would bare her teeth at him again, at the very least.

"Why did you have to give up?" he asked, his voice low. He didn't expect an answer.

He set the jar down on the table a little harder than needed, and walked away.

* * *

Her limit- and his- had been at two weeks. Two weeks had passed since she had been a furiously spiteful fighting little thing, and now she merely rested at the bottom of the jar and did not attempt to eat the drip of honey he was feeding her from a hole in the lid of the jar. She was wasting away, and would not live for much longer.

He could not stand it.

He wanted to shake the thing until it _died_, he wanted to prod at it with his finger until, like a fire, an ember of that temper flared up and bit him. When he looked at her now, he couldn't help but recall the feeling of wanting to hold her in his fist and snap a delicate arm or leg, and utterly destroy her, piece by piece.

Why did beautiful things waste so quickly?

He sat at the table and rested the jar in his lap while his hands busied themselves with a bottle of some liquid and a cotton ball, carefully wetting it, then unscrewing the lid slowly, watching for any stirring from the broken creature within.

None.

He quickly dropped the cotton ball in, and it bounced off of her listless form as he replaced the lid with another he had set out.

This one had no holes.

He put the jar back on the table and leaned until his head was resting in his arms like he was a teenager again, and he watched her. She blinked at him and coughed weakly, her eyes lowering.

"Shh," he murmured, though he knew she couldn't hear or understand him. She didn't have the capability to. "It's alright little one. I knew you were too pretty to keep forever. Rest now."

Slowly, she did. She rested her weary head on her arms, and her wings twitched once before laying flat against her back, like she was sleeping.

He waited for half an hour, then rose from his seat and pulled one of his many potions books off of the shelf. He opened it and scanned the pages for "faerie".

* * *

AN:

Written a long time ago, possibly and probably a year or more. When I went back and re-read it recently, I found it fit Snape's situation and feelings entirely too well. So here it is. It's short, and not nearly so poignant as I want it to be, but it's here none the less. I hope you enjoyed.

Feedback is appreciated, short though this is.


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